7 ms·

I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick

I started using emacs for email back in my uni days. I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. But, unfortunately, I had to go back to Thunderbird. With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. Then you've got all the HTML shit that people put in there. And the fact that many clients are simply broken and don't write the headers correctly which breaks threading. This is often confounded by broken servers which garble the headers a second time. It's amazing that something as simple as mutt or gnus (emacs) has everything you need: threaded messaging and convenient composition. Inline quoting is surely the only sane way to do quoting. Why would you assume the person you reply to has deleted their own message? My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. But do make it clear which parts of it you are addressing (inline quoting). You had to laugh when Google reinvented threaded messaging in the 2000s and advertised it as some groundbreaking new thing. So I gave up. I use a client that can deal with the stupid shit that other clients spit out. I also bottom quote now. Why? Because if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really.

bananaboy 9y ago
I agree, it's a losing battle. Such a shame. I have one or two friends who quote inline, and I love getting emails from them. They look so clean and readable. But it's pointless trying to do it with most people because most people don't reply with inline quotes and just top post and it ends up as a godawful mess. So I barely even bother any more myself. I die a little every time.
- u801e 9y ago
  These days, I just delete the entire block of text and post my response to thost types of emails :)
- hibbelig 9y ago
  I switched to Outlook because I got too many "see my comments in orange below" :-(
chriswarbo 9y ago
> I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. I do a similar thing, but using mbsync to save into maildir. That way it's a simple cron job/systemd service to do the fetching, and Emacs/mutt/whatever can read the data without needing a server process to be running. I used to use Gnus, but since it does everything in elisp it makes Emacs freeze :( I now use mu4e, which uses an external command (mu) to query the maildir, so emacs remains responsive. My mail-fetching script also runs mu after mbsync's finished, to index any new messages.
imurray 9y ago
if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really. Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!
- taeric 9y ago
  Using gnus, Outlook sees my quotes correctly. You can also "wash" messages from others so they look right.
- tokenizerrr 9y ago
  The only correct response to that is, "No, I haven't. Please fix your email client, or learn how to use it properly."
  - athenot 9y ago
    That was my response 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I've lost that battle and moved on. There comes a point when trying to fight the common expectation leads to zero return. (And yes, I miss the days where SMTP & NNTP servers would actually enforce the ratio of non-quoted lines vs. quotes lines, forcing users to trim the relevant parts of the message they are replying to.)
  - torrent-of-ions 9y ago
    I used to try this. Imagine being the only person using some weird text based thing instead of just simply using "email" (ie. logging on to webmail). Remember there is a huge number of people who have not used anything but webmail (like gmail).
u801e 9y ago
> With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. I think a lot of email clients expect that type of quoting/top-posting (conversation view for example). Another problem is that certain mobile email clients make it impossible to not bottom-quote. That is, they just present a composition window and don't give you the ability to position your text within the quoted email you're responding to. Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response. I don't recall anyone ever following the email "convention" of bottom-quoting.
- Santosh83 9y ago
  Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies. Most people actually don't quote at all. It's just that the majority of mail clients out there, including the Web ones, quote the message being replied to and position the cursor above it, and no one takes the effort reformat it, or remove it. Software needs to make it easy to choose portions of the message and automatically quote them in replies. Currently the usability of that aspect is broken. You have to cut and paste manually. A lot of messaging systems don't even add '>' marks.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies. On HN, this is handled entirely by wetware - there's an unofficial convention. You quote the relevant part of a post by preceding it with '>' (but not turning it into a text area!). Many people (myself included) also italicize part after the '>' to make it more visually different from their response.
- mseebach 9y ago
e40 9y ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned MH-E. I've used it continuously since the 80's. About 15 years ago it got multipart MIME support, which has improved every year. I can handle attachments like a boss. I even wrote a filtering system that sits on top of it (a replacement for the inc program that sorts into different inboxes).
ihuman 9y ago
> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom Do you mean as opposed to putting the previous message on the top, or not including the previous message at all?
- ajross 9y ago
  Long-time internet tradition has the replies going inline with the quoted message, with judicious trimming of irrelevant bits. It's frustrating that this has to be explained in the modern world. Smart young developers exist who have literally never seen a discussion that works that way.
  - leblancfg 9y ago
    For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when. If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.
    - ajross 9y ago
      Oh sure. The "mailing list" style presumes some archive exists where you can find the missing context. I'm not taking sides here (much), I'm just remarking how weird it is that kids today never even see the old style.
    - u801e 9y ago
      > For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to anyone who joins it at a later time. That's not the case with an email discussion that gets Cc'd to someone at a later time (since they don't have any of the earlier messages in their mailbox).
pif 9y ago
> We can thank Microsoft for that one And all the idiots who followed blindly.
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago
> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. In addition to the obvious idiocy of sending someone a copy of what they just sent you ... I think it's funny to realize how this behaviour actually has quadratic space and bandwidth complexity: If a thread is 10 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 55 messages. If a thread is 100 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 5050 messages. Or in general, if a thread is n message long, you have to store and transmit the data of n*(n+1)/2 messages.
- Jtsummers 9y ago
  And with Outlook, if you have a large TO or CC field that gets included at the top of the quoted message. Some dopes started reply-all chain at work a year or two back. After 3 or 4 messages it was a several MB message being sent to 1000 people.
CPLX 9y ago
> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?
- scbrg 9y ago
  > Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list Incidentally, your daily dosage coincides with the amount of times I've had to do the same thing at all since I started using email some twenty five years ago. > It's an incredibly common use case For some, perhaps. On the other hand, I'd suggest that another, at least for me more common use case is to know exactly what is being replied to. Which is possible with proper quoting, rather than the let's-just-slap-on-your-entire-message-at-the-bottom-and-hope-you're-a-mind-reader nonsense.
  - CPLX 9y ago
    Incredibly common use case: 1) Hi there I have a request for a meeting or phone call, or need something from your organization. 2) Great, I'm copying my assistant who will schedule this, or the other person in the company who knows the answer to your question, who I have now handed this task off to nearly instantly and seamlessly.
  - _acme 9y ago
    If you don't cc people all the time, I can't believe you've used email for any business purpose.
- wahern 9y ago
  With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow. OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that you purposefully and carefully edit and reply in the appropriate places. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. B
_acme 9y ago
MS Outhouse? Really? Are you a 13 year old boy in 2003? Your message shows that you've never used email in a corporate setting, where people cc other people (who will need copies of the previous correspondence) all the time, and people might take you more seriously if you leave out the Micro$oft 'jokes'.
a3_nm 9y ago
> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. I do inline replies and all, but I still leave the quoted rest of the thread at the end of the message. If the recipient doesn't need it, they are free to ignore it. If the recipient needs it, then it's there. Many people don't use threaded email clients, or don't have access to the previous messages for whatever reason, and I don't want to second-guess how my recipient does things. As long as it's clear where my reply ends and that there's nothing hidden at the end of the quoted previous messages, I really don't see the harm. (About bandwidth or storage costs: they are negligible, and I do not think it is a good usage of time to worry about them.)

bananaboy 9y ago

I agree, it's a losing battle. Such a shame. I have one or two friends who quote inline, and I love getting emails from them. They look so clean and readable. But it's pointless trying to do it with most people because most people don't reply with inline quotes and just top post and it ends up as a godawful mess. So I barely even bother any more myself. I die a little every time.

u801e 9y ago
These days, I just delete the entire block of text and post my response to thost types of emails :)
hibbelig 9y ago
I switched to Outlook because I got too many "see my comments in orange below" :-(

chriswarbo 9y ago

> I used Dovecot to run an IMAP server locally which would get my mail when it could. This made it very quick in emacs because it wouldn't have to wait for any remote server. I do a similar thing, but using mbsync to save into maildir. That way it's a simple cron job/systemd service to do the fetching, and Emacs/mutt/whatever can read the data without needing a server process to be running. I used to use Gnus, but since it does everything in elisp it makes Emacs freeze :( I now use mu4e, which uses an external command (mu) to query the maildir, so emacs remains responsive. My mail-fetching script also runs mu after mbsync's finished, to index any new messages.

imurray 9y ago

if you do inline quoting, MS Outhouse web client thinks that everything after the beginning of the quotation is a copy of the previous message and folds the whole thing, meaning your recipients get back what looks like an empty message. Really. Gah; that explains it. Occasionally I get a reply saying "you just sent me a blank email", while the text of my email is quoted right there in the email they've just sent me!

taeric 9y ago
Using gnus, Outlook sees my quotes correctly. You can also "wash" messages from others so they look right.
tokenizerrr 9y ago
The only correct response to that is, "No, I haven't. Please fix your email client, or learn how to use it properly."
- athenot 9y ago
  That was my response 15 years ago. Unfortunately, I've lost that battle and moved on. There comes a point when trying to fight the common expectation leads to zero return. (And yes, I miss the days where SMTP & NNTP servers would actually enforce the ratio of non-quoted lines vs. quotes lines, forcing users to trim the relevant parts of the message they are replying to.)
- torrent-of-ions 9y ago
  I used to try this. Imagine being the only person using some weird text based thing instead of just simply using "email" (ie. logging on to webmail). Remember there is a huge number of people who have not used anything but webmail (like gmail).

u801e 9y ago

> With the exception of free software mailing lists, people simply do not know how to use email. Bottom quoting is the default. We can thank Microsoft for that one, I think. I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. I think a lot of email clients expect that type of quoting/top-posting (conversation view for example). Another problem is that certain mobile email clients make it impossible to not bottom-quote. That is, they just present a composition window and don't give you the ability to position your text within the quoted email you're responding to. Though I do find it interesting that people on Hacker news, Slashdot, and reddit will generally follow the convention of responding inline if they quote the parent post in their response. I don't recall anyone ever following the email "convention" of bottom-quoting.

Santosh83 9y ago
Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies. Most people actually don't quote at all. It's just that the majority of mail clients out there, including the Web ones, quote the message being replied to and position the cursor above it, and no one takes the effort reformat it, or remove it. Software needs to make it easy to choose portions of the message and automatically quote them in replies. Currently the usability of that aspect is broken. You have to cut and paste manually. A lot of messaging systems don't even add '>' marks.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Though HN doesn't make it easy to do inline quoting. I tried it just now, only to have my nicely formatted text block overflow due to the browser's text area idiosyncrasies. On HN, this is handled entirely by wetware - there's an unofficial convention. You quote the relevant part of a post by preceding it with '>' (but not turning it into a text area!). Many people (myself included) also italicize part after the '>' to make it more visually different from their response.
mseebach 9y ago

e40 9y ago

I'm surprised no one has mentioned MH-E. I've used it continuously since the 80's. About 15 years ago it got multipart MIME support, which has improved every year. I can handle attachments like a boss. I even wrote a filtering system that sits on top of it (a replacement for the inc program that sorts into different inboxes).

ihuman 9y ago

> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom Do you mean as opposed to putting the previous message on the top, or not including the previous message at all?

ajross 9y ago
Long-time internet tradition has the replies going inline with the quoted message, with judicious trimming of irrelevant bits. It's frustrating that this has to be explained in the modern world. Smart young developers exist who have literally never seen a discussion that works that way.
- leblancfg 9y ago
  For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages -- it better delimits in a single page who said what, and when. If I know my conversation is intended to a small group I'll reply inline, but my default is quote-on-top.
  - ajross 9y ago
    Oh sure. The "mailing list" style presumes some archive exists where you can find the missing context. I'm not taking sides here (much), I'm just remarking how weird it is that kids today never even see the old style.
  - u801e 9y ago
    > For most messaging in larger organisations, having "paper trail"-style replies that you can forward to others has its advantages That brings up another point about using email for group conversations. If organizations hosted their own NNTP servers and commonly installed email clients also supported communication via NNTP, then this wouldn't be a problem. All messages already posted to a group would be visible to anyone who joins it at a later time. That's not the case with an email discussion that gets Cc'd to someone at a later time (since they don't have any of the earlier messages in their mailbox).

pif 9y ago

> We can thank Microsoft for that one And all the idiots who followed blindly.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 9y ago

> I can't understand why anyone thought it was a good idea to attach the previous message to the bottom. Most people just accept this as the way email is and never question how unbelievably stupid it is. In addition to the obvious idiocy of sending someone a copy of what they just sent you ... I think it's funny to realize how this behaviour actually has quadratic space and bandwidth complexity: If a thread is 10 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 55 messages. If a thread is 100 message long, you have to store and transmit the data of 5050 messages. Or in general, if a thread is n message long, you have to store and transmit the data of n*(n+1)/2 messages.

Jtsummers 9y ago
And with Outlook, if you have a large TO or CC field that gets included at the top of the quoted message. Some dopes started reply-all chain at work a year or two back. After 3 or 4 messages it was a several MB message being sent to 1000 people.

CPLX 9y ago

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list when I'm replying to an email. I suspect most people that have an assistant (or are one, or collaborate with others in general) do this constantly. It's an incredibly common use case. Should we all abandon this very common behavior in order to avoid your scorn?

scbrg 9y ago
> Dozens of times a day I add someone to the cc list Incidentally, your daily dosage coincides with the amount of times I've had to do the same thing at all since I started using email some twenty five years ago. > It's an incredibly common use case For some, perhaps. On the other hand, I'd suggest that another, at least for me more common use case is to know exactly what is being replied to. Which is possible with proper quoting, rather than the let's-just-slap-on-your-entire-message-at-the-bottom-and-hope-you're-a-mind-reader nonsense.
- CPLX 9y ago
  Incredibly common use case: 1) Hi there I have a request for a meeting or phone call, or need something from your organization. 2) Great, I'm copying my assistant who will schedule this, or the other person in the company who knows the answer to your question, who I have now handed this task off to nearly instantly and seamlessly.
- _acme 9y ago
  If you don't cc people all the time, I can't believe you've used email for any business purpose.
wahern 9y ago
With inline quoting the relevant content of the conversation is immediately and easily discernible. You may Cc people with a whole copy of the thread, but IME nobody bothers reading through. For one thing, it's in reverse order so very difficult to follow. OTOH, inline quoting was always destined to fail. It requires that you purposefully and carefully edit and reply in the appropriate places. That's asking too much of the vast majority of people. B

_acme 9y ago

MS Outhouse? Really? Are you a 13 year old boy in 2003? Your message shows that you've never used email in a corporate setting, where people cc other people (who will need copies of the previous correspondence) all the time, and people might take you more seriously if you leave out the Micro$oft 'jokes'.

a3_nm 9y ago

> My message to you is right there in the same thread in my client. Don't send it back to me. I do inline replies and all, but I still leave the quoted rest of the thread at the end of the message. If the recipient doesn't need it, they are free to ignore it. If the recipient needs it, then it's there. Many people don't use threaded email clients, or don't have access to the previous messages for whatever reason, and I don't want to second-guess how my recipient does things. As long as it's clear where my reply ends and that there's nothing hidden at the end of the quoted previous messages, I really don't see the harm. (About bandwidth or storage costs: they are negligible, and I do not think it is a good usage of time to worry about them.)